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Aging Is a Disease; Treat It Like One
theodp writes "In a letter to Sergey Brin, Maria Konovalenko urges the Google founder to pursue his interest in the topics of aging and longevity. 'Defeating or simply slowing down aging,' writes Konovalenko, 'is the most useful thing that can be done for all the people on the planet.' Calling for research into longevity gene therapy, extending lifespan pharmacologically, and studying close species that differ significantly in lifespan, Konovalenko says 'it is crucial to make numerous medical organizations recognize aging as a disease. If medical organizations were to recognize aging as a disease, it could significantly accelerate progress in studying its underlying mechanisms and the development of interventions to slow its progress and to reduce age-related pathologies. The prevailing regard for aging as a "natural process" rather than a disease or disease-predisposing condition is a major obstacle to development and testing of legitimate anti-aging treatments. This is the largest market in the world, since 100% of the population in every country suffers from aging.'"
Aging isn't a disease; it's a gift.
I pity the people who can't see this.
How fabulous! If we cure aging, then we'll get to have WAR all of the fucking time because of the population pressure.
Or we can reserve anti-aging treatments for the rich and privileged.
FTFY
That's actually exactly what the world needs the more our society becomes knowledge-oriented. If you could double the active lifespan of a (sane, healthy) individual, you'd get twice the amount of wotk for the same amount of high-school and college man-years. It's simple economy of scale.
Ezekiel 23:20
Aging is not a bug, it's a feature.
Make sure you ask for eternal youth.
"when Eos asked Zeus to make Tithonus immortal, she forgot to ask for eternal youth. Tithonus indeed lived forever 'but when loathsome old age pressed full upon him, and he could not move nor lift his limbs, this seemed to her in her heart the best counsel: she laid him in a room and put to the shining doors. There he babbles endlessly, and no more has strength at all, such as once he had in his supple limbs.'" (Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tithonus
As much as I like the idea of a longer life, there is simply no way our planet will support it. Which means it would be a perk for the wealthy and influential, rather than the unwashed masses. Nothing good could come from that.
Yeah, and immortal autocrats and overlords.
You're going to have to "cure" starvation due to crushing population growth first.
The statement "Defeating or simply slowing down aging is the most useful thing that can be done for all the people on the planet." is nonsense, if we do not first deal with the issues of , oh, for example, sex slavery (wouldn't it be GREAT to be forced to live 150 years as a sex slave?). How 'bout getting more people to a healthy 70, free of autoimmune diseases and cancer, well nourished, with a decent roof over their heads, and decent care for injury and illness? Could we, somehow, free the millions (if not billions) of women trapped in archaic, abusive societies?
We don't have enough decent-paying employment on the planet to support the population we have now, and you're going to double the number of years someone has to support themselves? Where do we find those jobs?
Maria Konovalenko has a serious case of aerobic encephalitis.
at the same time we're resource bound if people's life spans increased significantly and suddenly and our rate of growth stayed the same we'd starve ourselves in no time.
So much for the theory. And now look around you.
Essentially, it would give 90% of the population more time to waste, nothing else.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You also have a much longer time horizon. People don't much care what's going to happen a century from now since it won't affect them. Immortals very much do care, because they expect to be around at that point.
Don't worry, everyone who has a lot to lose won't get to fight in the war.
Seriously, why do you think that would change?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
1. liquor. 2. cheese. 3. and even human *beans*. aren't grandparents mostly wonderful? mostly?
You must leave earth. You get to live forever, but get on a space ship and go fucking explore the universe. Don't over crowd this tiny planet.
Isn't that pretty much the plot of the recent Neill Blomkamp movie?
Except there it was supposed to be a bad thing.
This world needs people to die to make room for new people.
What if there is knowledge that can only be revealed to those who amass a critical amount of knowledge and experience, or that is much more difficult to recover in any other way? What if there is such knowledge that nobody can open to us because we live too short a time? What would have happened if, e.g., Antonín Holý could have lived for another fifty years? I'd gladly trade this for some people having leisure time, as long as their net contribution isn't negative.
Ezekiel 23:20
Yes, sure, go tell the people in Angola or the other dozen countries in Africa that have 30 years less to live than you on average that aging is a problem. Or maybe the OP was talking about 100% of the population of every country a typical north american high schooler ever heard about.
And far more people exploiting our natural resources. We're way beyond capacity as it is.
No, we're not.
The doomsayers have been doomsaying for thousands of years, and we've always figured out ways to avoid the doom they're saying. But, hey, if fantasizing about doom makes you feel good, keep on doing it.
This. Imagine the absolutely huge amounts of crappy, useless posts now on ./, and then scale it infinitely. A veritable Ghraham's Number of useless, meaningless ./ posts.
Aging is a tradeoff. Cell reproduction and functions build up more errors at higher churn rates (metabolism). The end result is cancer. The alternative is to slow processes down to reduce the error rate, but slowing stuff down means parts start to not work right. Thus, we either die of organ failure or of cancer. There's no free lunch.
The only "fix" would be artificial error correction so that metabolism can be set to normal (30-year-old-like), and that's several decades away, at least.
Table-ized A.I.
Right. Whenever you ponder the advantages of longevity, read my posts and realize that given infinite life, I'll make them forever!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
is the most useful thing that can be done for all the people on the planet.
Most people won't be able to afford gene therapy or "phamacology". Lots of people can't even find enough to eat and/or can't stay well long enough to die from our current old age.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
What does that have to do with anything?
People don't worry about retirement planning because they expect the government to bail them out. People in societies without welfare programs have been worrying about old age and retirement for thousands of years, that's why they used to have so many kids.
Kind of, yeah. Nature's feedback mechanism.
- I stole your sig.
That sounds like a good reason to limit reproduction, not a good reason to make me die. I don't recall ever having made you die. What's your beef?
"This is the largest market in the world, since 100% of the population in every country suffers from aging."
This is completely false. Aging is only a problem once people are past their prime, and many people die before they get there.
IMO this should be our priority, not aging. There are many people who die or suffer drastically reduced quality-of-life because of problems we know how to fix, and can often fix cheaply and easily. We can get a much better QALY-increase-per-dollar by addressing the problems we know how to fix than we can by researching a cure for aging.
Any couple that has four children is already doing more harm to the population than one person living forever. Should we force-sterilize people at two or three kids per couple?
Yes, it will. The only thing that will 'end our species' is listening to the doomsayers.
But, as I said, if dreaming of global doom gets you off, keep at it.
Wow - people have more faith in Google than I thought.
I thought this was a joke story at first. I interpreted it as "mortality is the number one cause of death in the world".
At least put some sort of qualifications in place lest we preserve a planet full of douchebags.
src1138
The opposite is likely more true. For example, Einstein wrote all is great papers in his 20's. It is often said that the only way for science to move forward is for the old scientists to die. If we old farts stick around too long, we'll crush the crazy out-there creativity of the young. There's a reason we age and die: because it is better for the species. We here on slashdot have mostly become experts at something. I'm considered something of a "place and route" guru. Now I'm doing web programming instead! I love doing new stuff, but holy cow! The next generation of programmers need to grow up with this rat-bastard twisted way of accomplishing very little each day. I can hardly stand it. If geeks like us refuse to die, we'll stall this age of incredible progress.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
Any couple that has four children is already doing more harm to the population than one person living forever. Should we force-sterilize people at two or three kids per couple?
If only my modpoints would not have expired yesterday.
You, sir, are 100% spot on. I have 1 child, exactly for this reason. We can slice the world population in half within a generation and save the earth, rather than this energy conservation bullshit. There is enough to support 3 billion people.
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
Actually, if people continue to have the same number of children they do now, and our lifespan doubled (or tripled), we'd have a brief period of doubling or tripling the population, and then the rate of growth would fall back to original levels as people started dying again.
For most longer-living and/or higher educated cultures, the birth rate is already closely tracking the death rate. For those with a shorter lifespan, women are already limited to the number of children they can have in their lifetime, and the number wouldn't change.
Short story: the sooner we expand our lives, the better, as we can sustain doubling the population _now_, but that might not be the case after we travel further along the growth curve.
What ever happened to hunger is a disease, treat it like one? That was too hard I guess:
http://www.goofball.com/photos/thing_Paris_France_vs_Paris_Kentucky
Je me souviens.
If you could double the active lifespan of a (sane, healthy) individual, you'd get twice the amount of wotk for the same amount of high-school and college man-years.
So what do you do about the rest of us?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I say sterilize after one. And heavy tax burdens for families with more than one child. Irresponsible breading will be the death of us all.
Why is it that most of the people that I encounter seem to have been shat from the Sphincter of Mediocrity?
The opposite is likely more true. For example, Einstein wrote all is great papers in his 20's.
Maybe if Einsteins 20's lasted 100+ years he would have accomplished more.
I take it you have problems understanding the concept of an exponential function.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Even if this were true, you'd have a smaller proportion of youths in the knowledge worker population, but at the same time, it might be feasible to sustain a larger absolute population of knowledge workers world-wide in the improved economy so it could at least partially balance out.
Ezekiel 23:20
Why is this modded insightful?
Are some non-hippy people seriously considering negative growth and other absurd anti-globalist options as viable?
It is often said that the only way for science to move forward is for the old scientists to die.
Sure, but where is the scientific proof of that. Also, were this proven, fields could just implement "term limits." Many would rather reskill than die.
As to the "all great works before age X" that is just a rule of thumb, some great things are introduced by the elderly, and as long as longevity is acheived in a way that avoids prolonged states of senescence, many would be acheived by longer living humans.
Someone had to do it.
Population size has always been one of the strongest catalysts for economical and technological progress. Having said that, why do you assume that keeping the population in check while prolonging the active phase of life would be impossible?
Ezekiel 23:20
If the suddenly lifespan tripled, and people died at the same rate as born, then the population would triple before it would stabilize. If lifespan tripling was also accompanied by our current population growth, then it would much more than triple. And if lifespan tripling also meant reproductive years tripled, then woah, we really have a huge population crisis on hand.
I say sterilize after one. And heavy tax burdens for families with more than one child. Irresponsible breading will be the death of us all.
You would not want to fry the population with mass-produced tasteless breading. To bread the right way, I suggest the following:
1 dozen eggs (per human)
1 lb flour
3 boxes of bread crumbs
herbs and seasonings to taste
1) Mix seasonings in bread crumbs.
2) Coat a damp human in flour.
3) Dunk human in eggs and then roll it around in the bread crumb mixture
Then you can fry and bake the human, but make sure that it's fully-cooked. You can get diseases from undercooked human.
BOOP!
'is the most useful thing that can be done for all the *super rich* people on the planet.'
Dumbass. Should be fucking shot.
Why is it that most of the people that I encounter seem to have been shat from the Sphincter of Mediocrity?
Population size has always been one of the strongest catalysts for economical and technological progress.
Which has lead to exponential increase in consumption of natural resources, which are finite. Increasing lifespans would similarly lead to more people consuming. How long can keep playing this game?
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
If you correspondingly reduce the birth rate, the problem goes away. Many parts of Europe would already be at a sustainable level. A problem is that birth rate reductions seem to lag death rate reductions leading to large population increases in some parts of the world. A healthier old age where people can still be productive and less of a drain on health care resources would alleviate the dependency load problem much of the first world is/will be facing.
We still are left on a planet with finite resources... to support a theoretical infinite human population. Hugely poor plan. If you look at the productivity of human endeavors, it's not the old and wise who develop who introduce breakthroughs - unfortunately the truth is that the young do it. I believe it's more a function of they're not contaminated by past failure. Virtually all great breakthroughs, with a very few exceptions, are from people under 40. That’s just reality. By increasing lifespan, you're not increasing highest productivity. From a logistical stand point, what's being discussed – immortality – is something that the wealthy will pay for, and pay dearly, thus the poor can't afford.. since it’s a finite resource system, remember. The world isn’t nirvana, and people don’t give valuable shit away for free, and a large percentage of the population lives quite poorly when taken as a whole. By increasing the wealthy population, there’s less for the rest of us. I don't see how the world is better by engineering the Walton family to live to 500 years of age.
There is an enormously strong anticorrelation between lifespan and reproduction. Where are birthrates highest? Places like Nigeria, Somalia, Uganda, and other such places. Where are they lowest? Places like Japan and Germany, where women both have access to roles in society other than babymakers and where they can expect to live long, healthy lives.
I bet if the average Somali woman could look forward to a century of fulfilling life she'd have fewer kids.
You'd have half the people living twice as long with the same resources. That's not an increase.
Ezekiel 23:20
First world consumers, like the U.S. use 17 times the natural resources of developing nations. As you bring the birth rate down slightly and populations in developing nations drastically increase their consumption of natural resources approaching first world levels, we end up in a far worse position. You can't have 1/17th the number of kids you once did. I'm not advocating keeping people in poverty, but we have to realize at some point that we are consuming way more than the earth can produce sustainably.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Aging and death is a feature, not a bug. For any given species it needs to have a sufficiently long lifespan to produce (and possibly raise) offspring. The young then have to compete with the more mature for resources. In the case of humans, we also compete within our social hierarchies for the influence of our principles and ideas. To continue the cycle of adaptation and renewal as a species it is important to balance birth with aging, and ultimately with death.
If people want to live forever, they at least need to clock-out and watch from the sidelines at some point. Perhaps as heads in jars in some museum similar to Futurama (sans robotic Richard Nixon).
Account -> Discussions -> Disable Sigs
Very, very well said.
The sooner people shed these backwards ideas that "nature" is on their side and "knows best," the better. Hopefully if science does bear fruit on this front, they will be far from the reigns of power at the time.
Someone had to do it.
This is the solution to a LOT of problems.
Aging is an essential process in the cycle of life.
So are diseases and genetic defects, for example - thining out the herd through evolution, making sure the survivors have the most updated genes to fight the current diseases, themselves constantly evolving. Would you suggest that we stop treating them ? thinking like that, we should also stop extracting problematic wisdom tooth for people, because that also is part of the "cycle of life".
We have consciousness. This allows us to go beyond our mere nature and try to decrease suffering, for everyone of us. Aging implies suffering. And beyond this, aging should IMHO become a *choice*, not something that is imposed upon us.
In my mind, the very expression "cycle of life" evokes something almost sacred/religious (or at the very least romantical) in nature. There is no sacred "cycle of life". We are the product of randomness, and our consciousness a response born from the process of evolution to a universe where anything can happend, at any time: self-awareness, the ultimate (for now at least) way of surviving in such an universe, by allowing our species to react at time scale inferior to a generation - by being aware, we can analyze our universe, understand it, and overcome potential species-wide issues at the scale of a lifetime, instead of relying on genetic evolution over larger timespans. If one day we finally get our collective asses to space and start colonizing other planets, then even a nuclear winter following a meteor event (such as the one that wiped out 75% of earth's species at one point) becomes survivable for us. Such a thing would be highly unlikely without self-awareness.
And precisely because we are self aware, we should in my opinion consider aging as a remnant of our animal origin: something to be fixed. Eventually, even our very bodies ought to be replaceable. I know *I* certainly long to see in wider wavelengths, to feel and experience more and thus to become more aware. It is the essence of transhumanism, and in my view what we should aim for.
As for the ressources issue, we have an entire solar system full of ressources, and an exponential tech development curve to match it. Even on earth, tech such as transmutation will eventually make ressources wars pointless, and scarcity itself could become a thing of the past. I'm not saying we'll see it for sure during our lifetime, but I definitely wouldn't bet it won't happend. I was born during the eighties, and the tech progress I've witnessed during my (admitedly short) lifespan is simply staggering - a lot of the SF stuff I read as a child is already a common part of life. We live in a time of miracles, and I think it's only the tip of the iceberg and we'll see incredible, profoundly changing progresses during the upcoming century.
is pain and suffering. Humans will be the last to feel this. Plants and animals will take the brunt for a short while, then they will be gone. And there is always a top with exponential life forms in a system of closed resources. Humanitarianism will dictate that we destroy nature. Imagine factory farmed humans in 3 mile high sky-rises living in 5x5x5 cubes with rationed oxygen and mandatory tranquilizers and antibiotics. Awesome sauce. I'd rather see nuclear war.
Except people might care a little more if they planned to live that long. We're going to run out of oil in 100 years? In 100 years we'll fry from global warming? Almost everybody alive today will be dead and buried by then, so nobody cares much. Sure a few nice speeches about what we leave our children and grandchildren but if people realistically could live 200 years they'd care a lot more.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Oh, he doesn't. It's just that the population increase isn't an exponential function because the population increase is bounded while the exponential function is not.
Ezekiel 23:20
Completely agree. A google search of Konovalenko shows that she is a businesswoman in the anti-aging, cryonics, transhuman market. She makes money talking about increasing life spans and overcoming age and death. It seems kind of silly to listen to her opinion on the matter, as it is obviously biased.
Enjoy post-apocalyptic and singularity science fiction? Check out www.demonarchives.com, a new online graphic-novel.
Well, not quite. If we could bring all the nations on the planet down to zero population growth *today*, we'd still be looking at somewhere around a 9 billion person peak mid-century just because of generational lag. If we managed to cut that in half to one child/woman we'd still keep growing for a fair bit - we keep adding new people, and the elders keep living longer.
Current Birth rate: 19 /1000/year = 1.9%
Current Death Rate 8.4/1000/year = 0.84%
Current Net population growth rate = 1.06%
Even if we sterilized everyone tomorrow the death rate is still only .84% - that is a survival rate of 99.16%/year so in fifty years (2+ generations?) the cumulative survival rate would be 0.9916^50 = 0.5, or 3.5 billion people.
If we instead aimed for half of steady-state - a birth rate of 0.84%/2 = 0.42% then the "net survival rate" = 99.58%, for a cumulative 50-year rate of 0.9958^50 = 81%, or 5.7 billion
And just for sanity-checking sake, if we do nothing we get 1.0106^50 = 1.69%, or 11.9 billion people, which is about in line with the worst-case forecasts.
Of course that's just a very rough "back of the napkin" calculation, but I think it illustrates the challenges we face on this front.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Once death occurs, aging ceases permanently.
largest market
Those two words tell you everything you need to know about the motivations of Maria Konovalenko and why she would make such an appeal to a guy with very deep pockets.
Also, I can "recognize", say, unwanted body hair as a disease, but all that means is that I'm delusional; my recognition doesn't make it so.
There *is* that axiom:
But the person I'm quoting here is almost a counterexample. Leon Lederman, Nobel laureate and former director of Fermilab, wrote this in his book on particle physics, The God Particle. In his younger years, Lederman discovered some crucial elements of the Standard Model. What's he doing now? Writing books and teaching (even into his nineties), something that to my way of thinking is even more invaluable than his work in the lab. Feynman continued to do good work very late in his career (like figuring out why Challenger blew up). Looking beyond physics, Mozart's best work (the Requiem and the C Minor Mass) was done late in his career, as was (according to one musicologist I know) Brahms'. Rachmaninov was known as a brilliant teacher of piano later in life: I've heard one of his students play, and she is incredible.
There seems to be a pattern of people revolutionizing something or another early in their lives, and teaching and consolidating that revolution later on. I think our world would be more improved if we put more emphasis on the latter, as the dissemination of knowledge is as important for human wellbeing than "having a nonzero count of people who understand concept XYZ". Science needs more Carl Sagans and fewer Isaac Newtons these days, I think (and I say that as someone paid to do fundamental physics research).
Better thought:
If people can live for a thousand years, interstellar travel becomes easier. You can set off for Gliese 667 (believed to have a habitable exoplanet) at 10% of lightspeed and be there in only a quarter of your lifespan.
And if we start expanding into space, resource contention ceases to be an issue, at least for a few million years.
Only if most people chose to take advantage of the increased reproductive period by having more kids. Most people, I suspect, would instead take advantage of it by delaying having kids until later in life.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Only if people keep getting multiple children. If the average couple got just one child, the population would level off at twice the initial population even if everyone were immortal.
Alternatively, a similar effect could be achieved by having two children but letting each generation have them at a higher age than the previous one.
Or, if we manage to travel to other stars, the total size of our habitats would increase first cubically and then quadratically over time, as we spread across the galaxy, allowing every couple to have two children (since that would imply only linear growth in population). At least until we have filled the galaxy.
Actually, if you look at the societies that have a lot of kids one of two things tend to be true - they have high childhood mortality (i.e. have lots of kids so at least a couple make it), or children provide a lot of "free" low-skill labor such as in traditional farming communities. Both are relatively short-term considerations compared to retirement.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
We've always had a significant percentage of arable land undeveloped and ways to significantly increase production ... the way out has always been abundantly clear, grow more crops. We still have significant amounts of undeveloped land, but the percentage is much smaller than in Malthus his time and production increases are stalling. They are both going to hit zero at some point.
Also there are additional novel problems like peak water, peak oil, peak fossil fertilizer and peak charity (a lot of countries procreating themselves into the abyss can't feed themselves). In the past feeding the additional masses never really relied on better technology, just better organization and use of existing and already recognized resources ... which might be also still for fertilizer (ie. better recycling of shit) but not so much for oil and water. We absolute need to invent new sources of extremely cheap energy in the future just to replace oil and to power desalination plants ... or we're fucked.
Basically a single solution has always kept the doomsayers at bay ... and that solution is running out of steam.
Death is a necessity. If we look at aging from the point of view of evolutionary adaptation, it is clear that it serves a telenomic "purpose". The lifespan of each species is optimized for environmental conditions. Humans have programmed cell death that limits their lifespan to ~100. Other species have other lifespans according to their evolutionary niches, and some species are effectively immortal. It is within our own individual short-term self-interests to prolong life indefinitely. However, it is very clearly NOT in the best interests of society, nor the global ecology, for humans to be immortal. Humans consume vast resources, in great disproportion to their contributions to the greater environmental milieu. Someday, if and when humans (or some form of cybernetic organisms) become vastly more efficient, intelligent, and compassionate, it may be viable to consider immortality. But clearly, technological progress has far outstripped our understanding of its implications. Do we really want a world filled with creaky, old, rich people who never relinquish power? Because it's self-evident that, under the current societal conventions, immortality will not be available to the underclasses. This path eventually leads to a bifurcation of the species reminiscent of H.G. Wells.
According to some commentators here. If you consider aging a gift and not a disease, then you must consider a gift the suffering imposed on the elderly and the trillions of dollars that are spent in treating all these "natural" diseases. People who want to grow senile and dependent on help of strangers to eat their soup, can go f*ck themselves! I rather be strong and productive when I'm in my nineties.
Hearts fail at around 4-4.5 billion beats, period. (natural maximums that is)
This is just how they work. They'd likely need to be replaced outright since repairing it would not work with a standard heart due to the way they are created in the first place.
Damage is permanent and not repaired in the places it matters and wouldn't be possible to repair without serious work.
And because of the beating, considerably harder work at that. There'd be a struggle to repair the muscle while it is pulsing. One mistake and heart attack. #
Hearts are horribly fragile things. A hard enough punch (which isn't that hard at all) is enough to knock a beat erratic or out of sync in areas. An accidental sneeze at the wrong time can even do damage, or waking too quickly, or exercising too early, or being too cold or hot, or being too active or inactive.
Hearts are better off grown and replaced outright. It seriously isn't worth the effort in research to figure out how to make hearts repair themselves.
Stopping clogged arteries is a different story, that should be researched still. But just repairing the muscle is a pointless effort.
Hell, you'd honestly be better off with artificial hearts these days. They have improved considerably.
The brain is another tough cookie.
Plaque build-up is the biggest killer of brain operation next to the major diseases.
Repair and cleanup mechanisms already exist for these plaques, but for some reason that feature fails with time for no currently known reason.
There was actually some research done on this recently that showed some good signs of figuring out the process, but still needs some work.
Damaged brain cells and neural structures are also very hard to repair. Especially when we mapped the brain with even more accuracy and found out how stupidly compact and ordered it actually is and not a mess of wiring in the slightest. That scan rewrote everything, the entire basis of the science changed in an instant.
Those 2 alone are the biggest longevity killers.
We aren't even considering other organs yet.
As the saying goes, with a slight change, "You were born too early to become genetically immortal, and born to late to become an immortal Wizard."
Thanks, Merlin, you dick.
Yeah? And your momma's fat! See, I can hurl irrelevant ad hominems too! Wow, this is much easier than citing evidence and forming logical arguments. I should have just started with that. Thanks!
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Nature, at least on this planet, will not allow it.
Poppycock. Nature didn't allow opposable thumbs at one point, yet here we are.
And, one does not need to be narcissistic or even have a particularly positive self image to wish to avoid age-related diseases and the associated suffering.
Someone had to do it.
All this talk of extending life makes me wonder how it would be a good thing. The brain as miraculous as it is can only handle a single lifetime of information. We would all go mad if we 'had to live longer'. Just another example of wishful thinking. If we were supposed to live longer we would have different brains altogether. Just sayin'. ;)
Well, from your earlier comment you seem to assume that people generally behave rationally. Based on how paltry government retirement benefits already are, and how many speculate that such benefits will only get worse, even with current expected lifespans it would not be rational to assume that the government will be there to cover retirement benefits.
Forget retirement, think of how many people barely plan for how they are going to cover their expenses for even a month while at the same time making purchases beyond their means. Unless becoming immortal comes with a rationality and willpower upgrade, I highly doubt immortals will plan any better than mortals do now.
Account -> Discussions -> Disable Sigs
What about steady-state? If that's not viable, then our future is not viable, because it is mathematically and physically impossible to sustain exponential growth. You don't need to be a hippie to realise that, just have some elementary understanding of mathematics.
what's the point of extending the life span in the context of exponentially growing population?
Don't worry, it won't be available in 3rd world countries.
I noticed that everyone quickly jumped to the population problem. In fact this is not an issue at all.
Everything that grows exponentially has a doubling rate. One could easily argue that the real problem is in the newer generations since they will always represent significantly bigger population than the previous one. So the issue is not people not dying quickly, the problem is people being born. If everyone stopped having kids and would magically become biologically immortal the growth rate would be negative or 0% (due to the fact that people die in accidents).
Oh and by the way the only sustainable growth rate is exactly 0% not more. Anything more would mean it has a doubling rate. It's basic math.
It's true that population is not a big issue. But I am afraid the corrupt would use it to maintain their status indefinitely.
This is not treehugging or New Age; this is hard science (and if you don't classify evolution as hard science, that's your problem). Not reproducing leaves humanity in a vulnerable state. If a mass extinction event or nuclear war occurs, we'll be left with a demographic that is not very fit for repopulating the earth (even more so if you have their tubes cut, as you put it). Also, if we stop reproducing, we stop evolving. We won't adapt to a slow buildup of toxic gases in the atmosphere in case of a mass extinction event. We won't develop radiation resilience in case of a nuclear war. If an infectious disease evolves that has the potential of wiping out a large percentage of the population, we won't evolve resistance. And even if nothing goes wrong (which I don't think is a realistic assumption in light of history) we won't be getting any smarter. If we ever meet alien civilization, we'll be the dumbasses.
Moving to a slightly more philosophical level, the cycle of life and death, as GP put it, is a necessity. Nature^H^H^H^H^H^HThe universe is not kind on organized matter; everything that comes into existence eventually gets destroyed, whether by attrition or by unfortunate accident. Life has found a clever loophole around this rule: renewal. Kill me all you want, cruel universe, there will always be my wailing offspring staring you in the face.
The sheer, inexpressible horror of the world and destiny left to us by "nature" has stripped it of any say in the matter.
Wow, you really have the spiritual depth of a teaspoon, don't you? Learn to accept the fact that you and everyone around you has to die, learn to enjoy the moments in-between, and to keep things enjoyable for everyone else as well, and maybe you'll feel less unhappy.
They'll just have to compete with me, and my vast experience.
Hahaha you must be a comedian! Good luck getting an IT job if you're 200, oh wait, 50 years old. My wailing offspring will laugh at your inability to cram the popular programming paradigm du jour into your overcrowded brain. Or did you believe your capacity to learn things is limitless? Think of it, there are only so many neurons there...
*You* are the one who's supposed to provide evidence for such outrageous claims as that world's large deserts are the result of human activity, not me. I'm perfectly happy with the current state of affairs in the field of paleo-Earth sciences.
Also, Diamond is a notorious populist and reductionist. While this approach certainly sells books (many people are hungry for simple explanations), it doesn't very well advance historical sciences.
Ezekiel 23:20
Actually I'd like to retire at some point. I don't want to be working for 80 years thank you very much!
I'd hope that we in the first world can reduce our resource usage without a drastic decrease in quality of life. By sustainable I meant that there wouldn't necessarily be an increased number of people consuming at first world levels. I agree that that doesn't address the concern that our current consumption levels are not sustainable in the first place. Increasing lifespan need not make that much of a difference, though. (If our lifespans are finite, a birth rate of just over 2 is ultimately stable.) As more succinctly put in a modded down comment, how many children you have is more important to your resource footprint than how long you live.
One one side, we want to treat aging as a disease and prolong human life, so, YEA for team "already a member of the human race".
On the other side, we still have no real global policy on control our very own human population.
We can't keep having 'more' people and having people who live longer.
Something has to give.
On the bright side, if we could double our life expectancy, we can add many more years of usefulness to the human race and that's a plus, the years of experience accumulated and the wisdom to pass along to others, certain a plus too. If our human bodies don't wear and tear as far, then it gives us more time to enjoy life, all o this is good.
But, we should also understand the nature of 'finite' resources.
So it would be nice to see some balance on a global scale.
That, and greedy corporations stealing their pensions. And no, they used to have so many kids because 1) Insane infant mortality rates 2) No birth control Seeing as we've fixed those problems* we now have less kids. * Assuming the Republicans don't ban contraceptive pills.
If you could double the active lifespan of a (sane, healthy) individual, you'd get twice the amount of work for the same amount of high-school and college man-years. It's simple economy of scale.
New ideas are usually adopted once the old people with the old ideas dies . Classic example is the theory of relativity. There were brilliant physicist of their time who went to their graves refuting Einstein's theory because they had invested too much of their time and effort in the status quo. Furthermore, acceptance of the theory of relativity would have meant their work was invalid.
Forgive me for not recapitulating the entire world's history for you. I will, however, focus on just one civilization to make my point. Take Egypt, now a desert. Archaeological evidence points to it being a lush fertile land in the time of the pharaohs. It needed vast amounts of wood, for instance, for burning to cook food, make tools and buildings, for building things like pyramids, etc. Agriculture flourished in places were native vegetation grew. And as cities grew, they cut down an expanding circle of trees until it was no longer possible to transport the necessary supplies the long distance. Without trees, the soil washed away. And now it's desert. As in, in recent times. And shortly after the empire declined.
Same basic thing happened in southwestern US (Anasazi), Mexico (Aztecs), Argentina (Incas), Gobi desert (Chinese empires), and so on. They were all fertile and lush, which led to empires using the natural resources, which led to desert. Now, if you have evidence that these empires were built on, and thrived in, desert, please present it.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
We seem to have quite a few people on /. who think dying is a good thing. Makes me wonder why they are spending time posting rather than just ending their lives. Oh, it's other people dying that they think is good (or themselves far enough in the future it doesn't seem real). Well, I could try to change their minds but they are entitled to their opinion. It is also one way to avoid any dramatic population increases as all the death fans check out at the age they feel is 'right'. Is that the average lifespan for Africa, North America, the current lifespan or that of just 100 years ago? Everyone picks their own?
Nobody wants increased years of pain and suffering at the end of their lives. Unfortunately, that is what our medical system offers now with intrusive and expensive last ditch interventions in diseases caused by aging. In contrast, all the anti-aging research (whether slowing damage or repairing damage) would, if successful, extend the healthy years, not the unhealthy ones. Any increases in longevity are almost a side effect of that extension of healthy years.
So, death fans, you check out on your schedule. Over time what should be left is a world of healthy, happy, wise, experienced people who are interested in the world and grateful to be alive.
I haven't seen it, but I suspect the problem there is they don't actually leave - they just build themselves a fortress to isolate themselves from the costs of their actions and go right on strip-mining the planet for their own benefit. Not unlike the British Empire and how it pretty much decimated India and most of Africa so that they're still wracked by poverty and colonial-style government centuries later.
If they actually left they would no longer be a consideration for the people on Earth and there would be hope to recover, but as long as a parasite is still feeding on you you can't hope to heal.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Many diseases are just aging. The human body is evolved to operate at peak performance up to about 35, to be reliable to 40 and after that nearly every part of the body begins to decay. This is natural and designed to make room for the next generation.
There are 30,000 genes plus a lot of DNA regulation and RNA and protein modification involved in the human body and pretty much all of them will be involved in aging in some way. It was recently estimated that 20% of the active genes in a fat cell are involved with the insulin system which explains why we are no closer to a cure for Type II diabetes and the most effective treatment is still metformin, which was discovered in the 1930s.
Along with back problems, knee problems, feet problems, arthritis, parkinson's disease, alzheimer's, dementia they are all design flaws produced by evolutions limitations. There are no miracle gene fixes or drugs despite billions of dollars of research. Surgery can treat some physical problems but often it doesn't achieve anything, or creates worse problems, and infrequently kills the patient.
Human's actually have a surprising long life span and is one of the few species to live past reproductive fitness. This is because it is useful for some people to survive into old age and provide leadership, knowledge and help with the large effort of raising human children.
The argument that older workers are all more productive and knowledgeable is nonsense some of them are. But as Western economies become service focused with over 80% jobs in those industries the number of older workers has increased. But workers over 60 are still the minority. 20% of the population over 50 is on SSRIs at any one point in time. Around 40% have type II diabetes, half have back problems and half have arthritis. The good news is that by managing cardiovascular disease and diabetes better it looks like dementia rates are going down slightly.
People over 50 who are looking for work will be unemployed for 2-3 times as long as someone in their 20s or 30s. Society and jobs change so quickly that even 10 year-old knowledge is worthless. And we are short of jobs so that most developed economies have youth unemployment rates of 20-25% because fit older workers aren't retiring. And that was during the economic boom, at the moment many countries have youth unemployment over 50% and are going to massive social problems and costs from a lost generation.
Rather than a pointless quest to make life longer, we would be much better off targeting preventable real diseases and improving quality of life for people.
It's better for our genes that we reproduce and die, so that they can mix, and so that we can clean out damaged and worn bodies and start from a "fresh" cell once in a while. Scientific progress has nothing to do with it.
A relevant question with regard to science is why it is that breakthroughs often comes from young scientists. What if Einstein would have been able to discover revolutionary things at a higher age if his cells and body hadn't aged? Or perhaps it would just take longer than for a younger person, which wouldn't really matter if we had an eternity to live. As far as I'm concerned, the only science we should really hurry up with is solving the ageing problem and cancer. After that, we might as well step it down a few notches, 'cause then we have all the time in the world.
There's something missing in this discussion - in the event people manage to double/triple human lifetime, this would affect first and foremost developed countries, and those don't have an overpopulation problem.
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Population growth due to lack of death is linear and not nearly as consequential as growth due to having offspring, which is exponential.
We are in fact increasing longevity and slowing down the aging process, but that only means an ever-longer period of helplessness preceding death. The most frightening statistic I've heard is that for every year of increased longevity that modern medicine has provided, only seven months is an increase in the time one is in good health. The other five months is an increase in the time during which you're still alive but have lost the ability to care for yourself. What's really needed is to minimize that period of dependence, in other words, delay the aging process while at the same time making it more sudden. Slowing it down is the worst thing you can do.
There can be only one that eventually dies...when there is one the natural aging takes effect...I would rather find a immortal woman I could live with and keep on going :)
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
There's a reason we age and die: because it is better for the species.
There may be a reason that we age and die, but this certainly isn't it. Evolution just doesn't work that way. Individuals don't die for "the good of the species", they die for "the good of the gene."
but you do two things.
First double the amount of time you are wearing adult diapers. As if you slow aging then you are spending longer in that time of your life where you can't wipe your own ass anymore.
Second even more disgustingly you put politicians into office for even longer than now, so that your society stagnates for longer and longer periods of time. New ideas come mostly from young people. As old people are no longer caring about pushing boundaries and exploring beyond. There is a reason most conservatives are adults. they no longer want to change their mind on how things get done.
What we need is a way to slow aging down for 10-20 years and then speed it up afterwards. If your healthy energentic 30's and 40's could last until 65, and then a slow decline until 80ish with most dying off around 90 it would be great.
Then you could work for 30-40 years enjoy your retirement of 10-20 years and slowly fade down.
Overall longevity stays the same. enjoyable life extends farther. I say this with my current 90 year old grandmother who has spent 8 years basically bedridden. She isn't healthy enough to walk but strong enough to stick around. Do you really want to extend that kind of living to 20+ years?
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
"The universe built humans to last (x) long."
What the fuck does that even mean? Would you rather we come back to living ~30 years on average, like back in ancient times? What is that (x) you speak of, and how can you claim it is so well defined and most importantly so sacred it should not be modified?
That isn't even counting if people remained fertile longer. Lets say we doubled the lifespan. People would have 2 litters instead of 1 likely. They'd have a couple in their late 20's, then a couple more in their mid 40's. It would lead to a really crowded world and too many damn strollers on the bus ;)
Stupid people won't suddenly learn not to breed. They yet after 1000's of generations and they won't given parents that can keep earning long enough to bail them out of any crap they get themselves into.
Subject says it all.
Or have their 2 kids then have 20 more years to have a mistake. People would have to keep the birthcontrol going for decades longer or get snipped. Delaying kids till later in life sounds good assuming the longer lifespan meant we worked out effectively younger at any give point. What if we end up with 60 year old joints, hearing, eyesight etc but 30 year olds gonads?
Humans are territorial mammals, they were fighting and killing each other over access to resources long before Homo Sapiens arrived ~200ky ago, I see no signs of that behaviour changing but I do see signs of dwindling resources, in particular the most essential resource of all - water. Princes and priests don't normally cause' wars they simply rationalise them for the rest of their tribe. The instinctive 'mob' behaviour is obvious and easy to spot from a safe distance, but knowing the cause won't help you much when you're standing in a bread line.
But, as I said, if dreaming of global doom gets you off, keep at it
If pretending the likelihood of a self-induced population crash is zero makes you comfortable, keep at it. Fortunately for the rest of us, the pentagon considers climate related mass migration as the #1 long term threat to global security, and has held that opinion since the mid-naughties.
In shorter words, the life support system on this spaceship is broken but operable, we need a major upgrade just to keep the population we have. Taking on extra crew is not advisable at this time, we should be encouraging (as opposed to demanding) an overall reduction in numbers through natural attrition.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
That's not guaranteed: Article Breakthrough Discoveries Mostly by Older Scientists, Study Finds says that it used to be the case earlier, but now scientists need more time to finish their work.
I also have a personal opinion, where such young people were in a better position to make breakthroughs - supported by family, no worry about children, in an environment where research and experiment was much easier, etc.
You can look at the flip side of it though too: you can learn from and talk to more historical people. What if you could watch the latest Churchhill interview, or learn relativity from Einstein. Even less intellectual things: I'd love for Colonel Sanders to still be around so he could slap the shit out of the bastards that are screwing with his secret recipe.
Yeah, but when you think about it, you can only own so much stuff. Most people spend most of their working lives paying off a house. If you could pay off your house and still how 50 years to save without paying for a mortgage you would probably be able to stockpile quite a bit of cash. After 100 years of working, you'd basically be able to live off the interest from the money you had saved up. That is assuming the prices of things didn't skyrocket from too many people trying to take advantage of this kind of situation.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Egypt is no more a desert than it was in the Old Kingdom. That civilization was always perched on the banks of the Nile and relied on the Nile flood for irrigation. That's because all along the rest of Egypt was desert. Egypt, as a civilization, never actually died it just changed government and was rendered a non-superpower (as ancient things are reckoned).
As a province of the Roman Empire, Egypt was the personal domain of the Emperor because it was supplying a great deal of grain for the Empire and it was therefore extremely strategic. This continued through the Byzantine period and through the Arab and Ottoman periods.
Egypt's major problems with desertification do appear to be manmade, but they're much more recent than the end of Ancient Egypt. Things like the Aswan High Dam and dredging are having very noticeable effects on agricultural production and soil quality.
There is no doubt about manmade changes having an effect, but only recently have we been able to alter things on the industrial scale that the Earth can really be affected by.
And if we start expanding into space, resource contention ceases to be an issue, at least for a few million years.
Only if you're able to send people out at the rate that people are being added to the population.
At current birth/death rates, that's in the neighborhood of 200,000 people per day. Given that it's very difficult to imagine a technological leap anytime in the foreseeable future that would allow a migration on that scale, we're going to have to get a handle on our population growth -- one way or another -- long before mass migration will be an option.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
More research is needed for this horrible disease.
It is progressive with symptoms of irritability as well as illusions of grandeur.
Unfortunately (or luckily for the pre-onset non-symptomatic) it has a 100% mortality rate.
We thought this Methuselah guy almost had it beat, but no such luck.
I think money would be better spent searching for this fountain of youth, why stop aging when you can reset your age and then re-age over again in perpetuity?
I viewed the initial comment as relatively insightful. No, I don't think anyone's calling disease or disability a gift. But since the human body is a biochemical machine, it seems to generally cease functioning via those processes. (Not everyone is going to die cleanly and painlessly in their sleep.)
The "gift" refers to the beauty inherently designed into the process as a whole. IMO, medicine should be focused on giving the best quality of life possible, within the parameters nature has set up -- NOT trying to "cheat" the natural course of things.
I recall reading a piece of sci-fi a while ago where the characters had supposedly achieved very long life-spans (thousands of years, typically). Eventually, many just opted to "check out" after a while, voluntarily putting themselves into a coma. The idea was, after you've been around that long, you reach a point where you feel like you've "seen everything, done everything". The things you still haven't learned yet are pretty much the things you already concluded you simply have no interest in, or get no enjoyment from -- and you're bored with the rest.
It's just a fiction story, but I think it would be pretty accurate.... Most of the people who fear death or even aging just fear the unknown. If you can't say that you lived a "full, rewarding" life in the window of time most of us naturally get, you were doing something wrong. Plus, there's just something that motivates us, knowing that our time is limited on this planet. If you had essentially unlimited time to accomplish things, would you really get more done -- or would you just keep putting things off?
I'm not old enough to say for certain yet, but I sure hope there are some great, valuable and rewarding experiences to be had when I'm in those older, retirement years. When society (and your own health situation) deem you incapable of working a job each day for a paycheck and you've reached "old age", it's a little bit like a second shot at childhood, except with all the wisdom you gathered along the way as an adult. Surveys have been taken, asking people how happy they were in their 30's, 40's, 50's and 60's ... and overall, people were increasingly happy with each decade. So "youth" clearly isn't everything.
Maybe, probably, the decrease in mental agility that occurs as we age is part of the very aging process that would be "cured". Imagine if you could be as smart as you are in your 20's and wise and experienced as you are in your 60's.
Even if this were true, you'd have a smaller proportion of youths in the knowledge worker population, but at the same time, it might be feasible to sustain a larger absolute population of knowledge workers world-wide in the improved economy so it could at least partially balance out.
Because as we all know, 80 year old people love to build highways and skyscrapers. Unless our knowledge based economy figers out how to make buildings last forever, and repeal the second law of thermodynamics.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Actually,I think that you'll find that that equation is theoretical, not empirical. People are most productive when they are in an emergency, and yet have resources.
So no matter how smart Americans may or may not be, we have almost no productivity . At the top, there is no emergency. At the bottom, no resources.
Aging is the cure, not the disease.
Greed and theft are diseases. Treat them as such.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
You want your anti-age shots? They come with a free sterilization treatment.
You still get to have one kid per parent to continue the line if you don't already have one or two.
Three kids? Sorry... should have thought about it earlier.
Hey! Your genes get to live for you.
Couple of generations down the road and there may be millions of your offspring roaming the Earth and the Universe.
Which is why all boys will be made to deposit their sperm in the Arctic sperm banks when they reach puberty during the festival of The Great Northern Wanking (that's The Great Southern Wanking for those living in the southern hemisphere), upon which they will be sterilized.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Or, after a few decades in one field, they could retire, go back to school, and do something different. What if Einstein left physics and went to med school?
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
There's a reason we age and die: because it is better for the species.
If that's true, then the gene pool of people who take advantage of this treatment will lose out to those who do not take advantage of the treatment, and it will cease to be a problem.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Well, there's the simple fact that birth rates tend to decrease with increased living standards and population density. Most "developed" countries are now only gaining population through immigration - once the whole world is "developed", populations are actually expected to fall. A significant decrease in death rates will probably lead to a proportional decrease in birth rates.
Besides, we have time. I highly doubt we're going to go from a life expectancy of 70 years or so to 1000 in even several generations. More likely, we'll gain maybe a few more years with each successive generation, more than enough time for both society and science to keep up. But once we do hit a point where you can travel to another planet in your lifetime, I expect we'll start doing so in great number.
I already can't afford to retire. How am I supposed to afford living forever? Do you expect me to work forever? The hell with that.
"Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters
You're ignoring that a lifespan-tripling technology would be expensive enough that only a very small fraction would be able to use it. If someone came up with a magical pill or even a life-long regimen, they could sell it for whatever price they wanted, because the richest of the rich would buy it up regardless.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
But they do have a resource consumption problem...
Curse, not gift.
Don't pity me though. Instead, can I have your UID once you accept your 'gift' in all its fulness?
"we can sustain doubling the population _now_,"
Wrong. We don't even have the logistics in place to feed half of this planet. You think doubling or tripling the lifespan is going to fix that problem? You're sorely mistaken.
Source: I'm a horticultural research director, and I do this globally. You're so off base it's not even funny.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Your claim that anti-aging technology would be very expensive is based on nothing but your own pessimism, given that at this time we don't even know what such technology would consist of.
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And you're the self-important bastard who decides what "wasting time" is.
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> That's because all along the rest of Egypt was desert.
This claim is not well founded. Much of what is now the Sahara Desert (which sourrounds the Nile) was once much more fertile, It was particulaly expended as desert by overgrazing, especially by goats (which eat grass down to the roots and can ruin ground cover very quickly.) The ecological studies of this, especially for the current growth of the Sahara, are widespread, and careful attention to the lat 30 years of National Geographic magazine provides many excellent and striking articles on modern and historical cases of such defoliation.
Einstein gets toooo much credit. He was a moron compaired to Nikola Tesla. If Morgan would of just listened to him in the first place. And let him replace the current distructive ways of our society with living in harmony with nature and still have our advanced technology. And a greater understanding of the universe. Tesla understood much more of the workings of the universe than Einstein ever did.
The past tense of pay is paid.
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Well that seems reasonable. It seems clear to me that an educated, healthy person is more valuable to society than an unborn baby.
Where is moderation: -1 False?
The brain as miraculous as it is can only handle a single lifetime of information.
And you have how many multi-lifetime old samples in your research to support this claim.
Come up with a way to give me multiple lifetimes, healthy as I was in my late teens, to see if my brain crashes due to "filling up", and I'm willing to be an experimental subject.
I'm already in my late '60s. I'm also studying for a college degree and getting 4.0 (much better than when I was trying to work my way through college and avoid the draft during the Vietnam era.)
Psych research has shown that intelligence, as measured by I.Q. tests, increases with age. ("Senile dementia" is a handfull of specific diseases, which only a fraction of people get, and eliminating THOSE would obviously be part of "curing" aging.) Meanwhile, the brain's capacity for both memory and processing is very large (as shown by the amount of info people with eidetic memory accumulate, and are able to index and retrieve without apparent problems, over normal life spans.)
So you think there's a limit to how much the brain can handle, a wall we might hit if we cured aging? Let's find out. Bring it on!
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Really, I honestly don't care if I live to be 70, 80 or 90 but what I do care about is quality of life. I'd take perfect health, no bad knee, no bad back, no arthritis, no shoulder problems and if that meant I dropped dead by the time I was 75 then so be it and at least I'd be better able to enjoy my life rather than being in endless pain in one way or another.
Most life extension technology now available to residents of civilized nations is fairly inexpensive, and the 3 most important things have negative cost: don't smoke, don't drink alcohol, don't use mind-degrading drugs. Decreased air and water pollution is available generally at no individual differential cost. Food supplements cost less than the difference between eating at a restaurant and fixing your own food.
Technology like blood testing and individual genetic analysis is falling in price rapidly as technology improves and becomes more automated.
Generally, the people who get anti-aging treatment (and it isn't just one treatment, I can choose a few among a multitude of options) are those who choose to do so: those who are paying attention and those who value their own life more than a new car or expensive clothes.
...
Your opinion of successful people is typical of those whose attitude toward the rewards of hard work is jealousy, rather than engaging in hard work. Quit insulting those better than you, and earn your own success.
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To me the fact that we all eventually drop dead is not a bug, it's a feature. It's the only way we rid our society of old assholes! -- Lewis Black
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
99.99999...% of all species that ever lived have never built a skyscraper either.
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
I'm sure they'd try but I'm not overly concerned about that. For the obvious corrupt like dictators, they don't die of old age in that many cases anyway. For the less obvious but more numerous corrupt like the rich bastard exploiting his workers they tend to pass their position on to the kids in a dynasty and the new boss is the same as the old boss. Does raise a question though: does the notion of inheritance become effectively obsolete? Or other dynasty structures like royal families where the old guy has to die before everyone moves up? Interesting questions and I admit choosing above an optimistic or at least neutral position on your point. I really don't know whether it would be that different than what we put up with today. There was corruption with lifespans of 40 and there still is at lifespans of 80. I do know society would change, including in some unpredictable ways but don't think that we should all die sooner than necessary to try and avoid change.
The people who push boundaries are not the bulk of the population, and it's the bulk of the population that determine who gets into elective office.
You conflate "old people" (which currently means people over 65) with adults (people over 20).
There are multiple reasons that people become more conservative as they age (where conservative is taken to mean thinking that it is proper to be responsible for yourself and not burden others.) As one becomes an adult one is no longer cared for by one's parents, and the advantages and moral superiority of that condition become apparent. As a person gains experience, he sees that the fallacies he accepted as a child don't play out well in the real world. The fallacies are generally "liberal" or "progressive" ideologies.
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Everyone wants to live forever, but death is the natural way of selection within the species. If death was "cured" then the species would stagnate. Leadership would not change. Younger generations would continuously be stuck at the bottom of the heap (or, at least, in their place within the heap). Imagine working at the same job forever, never getting promoted or increased in pay. Now that wouldn't be eternal life. It'd be Hell.
I see your point, but the end result tends to be for all the smart productive people to leave procreation to the welfare moms. This is why I have 5 kids. Obligatory: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icmRCixQrx8
1. Desertification of the middle east and the American southwest are part of climate cycles. Claiming that it was caused by overuse denies the experience of places like New England, where once farming stopped the forests reclaimed the land.
2. Civilizations that flourish and die in areas of lush vegetation tend to leave little evidence (wood rots) and tend to be hidden by resurgent vegetation.
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What the World, needs now, is Death, sweet Death, it's the only thing, that there's just, too little of.
Yay, Death! The Savior of us all!
Yeah like he would have had the urgency to accomplish more.
The only species on this planet being concerned about this aging issue, all other's age, die and evolve.
Maybe another sign of de-volving???
How deep are the deepest mines, and how much of the earth's area is currently subject to mining activities? How much of the sun's output are we currently utilizing?
We've got a long way to go before resource depletion is an issue worthy of serious consideration. Now, it's just a playground for scaremongers and fools.
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All things being equal, my money would be on the reverse—twenty-year old bodies at age 60, but with dried up, infertile eggs.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
people with prolonged lifespans would probably concern themselves with decisions that currently would have no consequence within their lifetimes. Don't care about (fill in your thing here) because it won't hurt anybody for 150 years? You might think differently if the average lifespan were 450 years. A longer perspective wouldn't hurt us at all.
Improved technology can allow higher levels of general wealth without increasing resource consumption. ICs use less material than discrete transistors use less material than tubes for a given electronic function. FRP kayaks use less material than all-plastic or wood kayaks. Composite aircraft weigh less and consume less fuel than older technology.
As the supply/demand of a resource shifts to make it more expensive, alternatives are developed. The belief that enriching poor populations necessarily causes a resource crisis is unjustified, and sounds suspiciously like a conspiracy to keep them miserable.
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> My wailing offspring will laugh at your inability to cram the popular programming paradigm du jour into your overcrowded brain.
> Or did you believe your capacity to learn things is limitless? Think of it, there are only so many neurons there...
Ah, but they have not accounted for my ability to forget!...
One of the best movies ever. If you're immortal you might want to watch it, so you'll be prepared for your future.
Just plain not true. Some very simple organisms don't age.
If all people remained vigorous and productive throughout their lives, human life on earth would be immensely better.
Do not confuse aging with inevitable death. Also, human females have only a finite number of eggs, so don't confuse aging with the end of fertility.
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Or you could just enter cryogenic stasis for the trip. You'd consume a lot fewer resources along the way if you were a meat popsicle, and you wouldn't get bored.
I honestly doubt that.
If you look at some things you wrote several years back, you will find that you will be embarrased and shake your head at yourself. That shows that you are always changing and becoming wiser with time.
Of course with age it starts to work backwards, when your mind starts to deteriorate. But this is what this whole article is about: If we slow this process, it will give you much more time to keep advancing yourself.
In the end it would be quite a huge and beneficial achievement. Biotechnology is such a quickly progressive area of science at the moment. It is a very exciting time to be alive!
Having everyone as a healthy adult in their prime will change a lot of things. It won't be better or worse, just different.
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
Your lack of vision is appalling. We're very close to being able to artificially create any desired possible human characteristic through direct genetic manipulation, and that includes pollution tolerance, radiation tolerance, arbitrary disease immunity, and much greater intelligence. Why wait 5 or 500 generations when the necessary changes can be made in a year?
Perhaps you've never had the experience of accompanying a person in the last year of Parkinson's or some similar hideous age-related disease; there's no other excuse for the hideous cruelty of calling someone shallow for wanting that to end.
Coming to death need not involve intense suffering, and one way to achieve that is to defeat aging.
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Who said nature is on our side? Who said nature is thinking at all? The dinosaurs certainly didn't think nature was on their side. Some--those that had the ability to reproduce and change through the cycle of life--still remain. The rest are gone. I suspect immortal humans will find nature to be just as harsh as mortal humans do. Nature holds the reigns of power in this universe, whether you like it or not.
That's actually exactly what the world needs the more our society becomes knowledge-oriented. If you could double the active lifespan of a (sane, healthy) individual, you'd get twice the amount of wotk for the same amount of high-school and college man-years. It's simple economy of scale.
And slow down evolution by the same factor.
Death isn't a disease. It's nature's way of cleaning out the old to make room for the new. That's how species evolve. Having a bunch of "old fogeys" hanging around and consuming resources would act as an impediment to the process.
~X~
"we can sustain doubling the population _now_,"
Wrong. We don't even have the logistics in place to feed half of this planet. You think doubling or tripling the lifespan is going to fix that problem? You're sorely mistaken.
Source: I'm a horticultural research director, and I do this globally. You're so off base it's not even funny.
I agree about the logistics about feeding the planet; sustaining is a different issue in my idea. The problem isn't food shortage, it's logistics and politics. However, my comment was assuming the logistics issue was fixed, as in order to provide the entire population with this miracle cure for aging, the same logistics would have to be overcome in the distribution network. What I was saying is that doubling or tripling lifespan isn't really going to make a difference.
Something else I mentioned in one of my other comments: doubling or tripling cellular lifespan won't make much of a difference to generational population anyway, as most people will die before they're 130 irrespective of cellular lifespan. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rate -- as people get older, the odds of dying catch up with them, whether it be by externally imposed death or internal complications. Most likely, aging is tied to cancer, and is also related to strokes and heart failure -- so if we "cure" aging, those other illnesses will also be fully understood and treatable (assuming people are willing to undergo the treatment, which will likely consist of gene therapy combined with diet and exercise regimen).
So doubling or tripling the lifespan won't fix the problem, but neither will it impact it in any meaningful way, other than possibly to make people think more about long-range consequences of their actions (which may help or hinder the logistics issue).
But they do have a resource consumption problem...
They also have a growing healthy lifestyle problem, which will kill them off irregardless of this technology.
If the suddenly lifespan tripled, and people died at the same rate as born, then the population would triple before it would stabilize. If lifespan tripling was also accompanied by our current population growth, then it would much more than triple. And if lifespan tripling also meant reproductive years tripled, then woah, we really have a huge population crisis on hand.
Lifespan tripling could mean reproductive years tripled for men, but women have a limited number of eggs. There's have to be more going on than just cellular preservation to create more eggs during embryonic development.
And tripled possible lifespan doesn't mean everyone living to fulfill that lifespan; the average human lifespan is currently sitting at 67, even though people can comfortably live into their 90's given the right conditions. This kind of points to the fact that roughly 70% of the world's population isn't dying of "old age". Of course, many are already dying of starvation and treatable ailments, and that may increase with the longer potential lifespan.
It's the beef that'll make us starve. Eating poultry, vegan or eggs puts a shit ton less pressure on food resources.
Life isn't a Disney movie. You're confusing some quasi-religious 'Cycle of Life' mumble-jumble with real life cycles, as described in biology textbooks. The carbon cycle. The Krebs cycle. And so on.
I certainly don't dispute your wish for space exploration/colonization--I'm a NASA fan myself. But I find myself puzzled by the so-called trans-humanists--same as the singularity folks really--who pooh-pooh nature's cycles of life while failing to explain where they will find the energy needed to create this organic or mechanical transformation they seem to long for. It took 4 billion years of your random trial and error for nature to come up with a workable biosphere on a planet with a finite amount of energy falling on it every day, amidst some very immutable laws of physics.
Your body IS replaceable. It replaces itself about 7 times during an average lifetime. Naturally, your brain, that part you consider YOU, doesn't change quite so much. But everything in this universe decays. It's called entropy. Unless you morph into some higher plane of existence like V'ger, you're going to decay. That's not religion. That's science.
...The doomsayers have been doomsaying for thousands of years, and we've always figured out ways to avoid the doom they're saying...
No we haven't. Entire civilizations have vanished due to "not being able to figure it out" or "being too stupid to listen" or "just plain stupid" or "being unlucky" or some combination. This coming century will be the first time we will experience serious global shortages in critical resources. While human extinction is an unlikely outcome, you'd have to be naive to think it won't seriously impact us.
~X~
Shouldn't the breeders be the ones who have to leave? They're the ones who are allegedly causing population density to be a problem.
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It's common is poor areas to be aged at 40 years, to be worn out from hard labor and disease. Improved resistance to aging helps them also.
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> Wrong. We don't even have the logistics in place to feed half of this planet.
Yet these people are apparently still eating. I think I would have seen a headline or two if a famine killed three billion people last year.
Double the population and it would hasten the death of some but it's hard to argue that we wouldn't find a way to feed most people since we keep finding ways to do it.
Short story: the sooner we expand our lives, the better, as we can sustain doubling the population _now_, but that might not be the case after we travel further along the growth curve.
Actually, based on current trends, we're not going to travel much further along the growth curve.
The global birth rate has peaked and flattened, and I'm talking about rate in number of children per year, not number of children per woman. The population is still growing because that peak rate is much higher than it was. But at this point, we're basically getting two billion new people in each generation, and we live about five generations, so we're on course to max out at 10 billion people. The developed world is already at or below replacement rate (including the US, but immigration offsets the losses and keeps us growing) and the developing world's birth rates are declining as they get wealthier. So in all probability, after we hit that peak population, the total will begin to fall.
Now, if you throw a doubled lifespan in there, then we are going to end up at a much higher number. Probably not 20 billion, but higher. Assuming you could pick a time, it would be better to wait until the population peaks and then falls some before increasing life span.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
A person is valuable to himself as long as he lives.
Many tree species last many generations. Your view of nature is silly at best.
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We are presently experiencing massive and sudden alterations to the human survival conditions due to social and technological advancement in the past couple hundred years. Our biology is not yet caught up with these changes. But traits which significantly impede reproduction are lost from the broader population in short order.
Think of anyone you know who isn't having children. If there are any specific genetic characterics which weighed heavily in that choice, there's a good chance those are characteristics people generations from now are simply not going to have, because the population is going to be descended from those who thought having a dozen kids and living on modest means was a great idea -- even if it wasn't -- not the people who smartly saw they could buy a bigger house if they never had kids at all.
(I sometimes joke with a friend who is very worried about overpopulation that, instead of having only one child, it would be much more effective for him to have a dozen children and raise each of them to share and advocate his views.)
Whether or not my speculation on that is valid, it seems to me that data collected right now is not a good long term indicator. Too much is changing which never had the prospect of changing before.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
Society be damned. I have use for a long life, and you have no right to deny it to me.
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Discussing on Slashdot about wasting time most definitely is wasting time ... damn, now I'm wasting time, too! :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
The past tense of pay is paid.
Thank you. I already feared I'd have to pay it myself.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Life isn't worth it if you can't have a good steak.
I don't think we need to be able to better treat diseases to counteract aging. Aging happens to us from the day we're born for 90-100 years max. Slowing down that process so that it takes 300 years to do the same thing, seems achievable without messing with heart disease or cancer. It's no guarantee anyone will live that long, and in fact, the further out we extend it the more likely accidents, or heart disease, or cancer will pay a role, and less likely anyone will be able to achieve max lifespan - but at least it's a possibility.
No. Evolution doesn't work for the good of anyone or anything. There are no actors in evolution, only evolutionary forces. We define the "winners" as those who survive, and then note that the winners survive. But that's just because we defined them that way, not because there's something inherent in evolution which makes the "right" genes survive.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Interstellar travel accelerates aging, and thus it must be regarded as a disease not a cure. Besides, you'll be among the five billion people employed in sequestering all radiological sources in the earth's mantle into some deep pit in Nevada. If you survive your 10,000 years term of service at this biologically hazardous occupation, with luck and good behaviour you'll be eligible to take out the one billion dollar mortgage on a 400 sq ft condominium of your very own somewhere in free-wheeling Singapore a full fifty floors above the prison levels exposed to god-knows-what in the lower atmosphere.
The doomsayers have been doomsaying for thousands of years, and we've always figured out ways to avoid the doom they're saying.
The doomsayers have been telling me for all my life that I will die someday, yet I'm still alive and always figuring out ways to avoid this 'death' they speak of.
Considering that, and TFA, there's no reason to believe that I won't live forever.
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
I love a good steak. I mean I really fucking love a good steak.
But if giving up steak would allow me to live indefinitely?
Bring on the chicken pot pie!
I think you missed the point of his comment. Assuming society becomes more *knowledge based* and not as physical, then maintaining knowledge becomes more important than physical adaptation. You may disagree with his premise, but unless you're very young or an old person who hasn't learned much, you should realize there's value in knowledge and experience - despite how much consumer culture has tried to convince you otherwise.
New people are great, and new ideas often come from new people. But then there's also the fact that a lot of the most awesome people in the world are older people. I don't know who you personally idolize, but imagine if they'd had another 100 years to be awesome instead of withering away. That doesn't preclude other people from being awesome, it's just more awesome overall.
While you are correct some youth fallacies don't play out in the real world. the simple fact is a lot of people as they age don't like changing their mind or viewpoints on anything. I know one person in particular who doesn't think she is a bigot but will completely judge a person by what they are wearing. If you dress in dirty clothes then you have to be poor. I can't seem to convince her that how you are dressed in that instant is a reflection on your entire life.
Take computers it has literally taken ten years to teach the 40-50 year olds how to use computers in general but the majority of them still struggle with basic things like file or even window Management. Older people are more likely to have one giant window taking up everything and forget they have other windows open behind it.
Younger people need to push the boundaries and a lot of those are fallacies that will fail. But not all of them. and those ones that don't are the ones that matter. If you take longer time away from those who push boundaries and give it to those whose ideas are stagnant nothing good will happen.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Well, you know what they say about getting older.
First, only you notice that you get stupider.
Then, you and everyone around you notices it.
Finally, only those around you notice it anymore.
And then life's great again.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Personally, I consider time spent not gaining insight is wasted. Even posting on /. can be time well spent, considering this made me reflect about the definition of "wasting time".
It is highly subjective, of course. On an objective level, one could define a waste of time everything that does not further ones own goals or humanity itself. By that definition, we all waste 90% of our time. I think what matters is what happens during those other 10%.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The birth rates might indeed be high in those countries, but what is the infant mortality rate there as well?
There is a reason those countries have a high birth rate, because it's the cheapest internal method of ensuring enough survive in order to allow for enough hands to provide for the family a few years down the line.
Take my friend in Uganda - he comes from a family that lives in the southwest region, in a typical village that has no mains electricity, water or sewerage. He is the eldest out of 12 births, 7 surviving children. His father sent him to university to train as a nurse by selling off family land, something his father was ostracised for in the village (you don't sell off your lands, you need them to live). Wilber is now a successful nurse in Ugandan society, and he is paying the fees to put his siblings through university as well, with his two younger brothers both graduating as nurses, one sister as a pharmacist.
Because Wilber now has access to modern medical knowledge, something his parents did not, his first child survived and his wife is now working on their second, and that's it - that's all they plan to have. Oh, and his wife is also a nurse.
In the places you note, large families are often a necessity for later life, rather than the result of the woman being stuck in a position - and it's changing even now where modern medicine is becoming more and more available.
The universe is infinite. There is no problem with sustained growth.
and earth should treat you as such.
I am the luckiest man still alive. I have a family whose members do interesting things. There are young ones growing up some well, others not doing so good. However long I live I expect and hope it will stay like this. I am not a burden yet (except occasionally) and at whatever point I die there will still be developments I would like to see how they turn out. Others will need my house, my space to live. On the other hand if I go to a shopping center and see the seniors walking slowly around not having nearly as much fun as the frazzled mother with two toddlers. I heard of a senior the other day who was an expert at Solitaire. I do not want to be like that.
I agree partly with your post: populations much lower than ours have completely destroyedenvironments due to political greed, anti-distributionism, and such. Thus population reduction is not an answer.
But we have a "how do we get there from here" problem with solving the distribution. No offense, but your theorem sounds like Karl Marx's answer, and he missed a huge point: that distribution tends to follow a gaussian curve, and therefore is a thing of entropy, and is as rock solid a problem as you are going to see.
Which is not to say that population controls are a solution: population controls are another aspect of distribution, and themselves cause wars and vionlence and environmental degradation (China, anyone? Beijing smog?).
The problem is more one of how to flatten out the Gaussian curve, then not how to eliminate it.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Oh, one other thing: as long as there are is jihad, the jihadists will want to kill us. As long as there are islamists there will be jihadists; and as long as Islam allows four wives per man, there will be zones where men must do without wives, and the local powers that be will be faced with a choice: direct the rage outwards through islamism, or face the rage themselves. Thus, there will be islamists.
And yes, there can be other cults just as bad in this aspect; but islam is the one we see today. Tomorrow we may see the same rage from one-child countries that specialized in males.
And yes, war really does destroy the Earth much faster and more devastatingly than overpopulation.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
As we age, the myriad systems that regulate blood and tissue function seem to be slowly degrading in a ...well... death spiral. Metabolic syndrome is such a process. Blood sugar levels pitch up/down like the deck on s ship in a storm, dragging the body along for a unsettling ride towards diabetes, hypertension and overall degradation. This would be a great collection of symptoms to start with. Telomeres seem like another good place to start looking as cells can lose ability to self repair their DNA.... Nothing good can come from these!
Time for a new Political party in the US (or two!) One is off the rails Other cant pony up a leader.
Your brain uses about 1/5 your resting metabolic rate according to this:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=thinking-hard-calories
But aging is a natural process. And most importantly, cells do not and cannot live indefinitely. The telomere on the ends of genes, that protect the genes, lose a little bit of structure every time a cell multiplies, so regardles of gene therepy or whatever, that cell will die. Nothing can prevent that natural process, which is why aging is not a disease, but a natural process.
If you want to spend billions of dollars on research, it might be better served on finding "cures" for the causes why many people have shortened lifes, such as malnutrition, lack of sanitation, poverty and of course violence and war.
If you alter and manipulate genes so humans could live forever, they won't be humans anymore. They would be something else. So, sure go out and destroy the human race and create a new species, but please, don't pretend that we would be talking about humans. Maybe this new species will even be so kind as to have wax figures of homosapiens along side Neanderthals in their museums. Or, maybe they will even keep a few homosapiens around to work in their factories and farms. Who knows, It will be a brave new world.
There you were, one with the universe, without a single feeling, thought or complaint, and the disease of life infested your region, pulled you into this world and subjected you to the demands, thrills and horrors of life. Then when the game is done with you you finally get to be disassociated, disassembled, and return to the glorious restful state you were in before life disrupted your rest. So what is the point?
Actually, it looks like we're just about fucked, as reported here on slashdot.
Now, if you have a similarly well-researched academic source that says everything is just fine and there's nothing to worry about, please post it.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
So it's a coincidence that all ancient civilizations, that tore down trees for thousands of years, are now on the site of deserts? The place called the fertile crescent is now almost completely desert? Just a coincidence? The only desert in North America is where a civilization died out? Just a coincidence? I guess the fact that Easter Island is now completely tree-less after tearing down all its trees to make the Maori statues means nothing to you. Or that in Greenland, when the trees were cut down, all the soil ran out into the ocean, and the settlement died? That's a relief! I thought that maybe our wholesale destruction of forest around the world might impact us in negative ways, but I'm glad it's all just a coincidence! Thanks!
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Well said. It should be about quality of life.
2 mechanics see an old car. The first mechanic throws his hands up in the air: "It's impossible, just throw it away and get a new one". The 2nd mechanic already has a spare car he's kept working, oiling the parts, sealing out rust, maintaining it. While it's a lot of work this car is easier to work on, from a time when things were built to last. He does what's needed to get it right.
You can fix these things but yes it's work. And that's why it's awkward and the truth is very hard. It's easier to have babies and start again with death than to fix it all.
That said...
how very, very lazy!
The technology to me to fix the many of humanities problems doesn't seem like a big ask in the very big picture of looking at things. If we had the tech for our bodies as we have for computing we'd be there right now.
Taking a perspective here by looking back in history. Chinese tradition views the average life expectancy as ~120 years. That's from 2,000-4,000 years ago. It then has the viewpoint that anything shorter than this is due to stress on the body, not that dying early is something to worry about (actually) and that if you live a healthy lifestyle you will get to 120 years. I don't expect to live that long. I don't mind a whole bunch at the moment... But I would like to have the quality of life that such a long life can provide. I know in any event I'll probably do better than the ~40 years for the stereotypical savanna African plains we had for most of human history.
All of my parents, my grandparents have gone to a doctor recently and the doctor has dismissed their (very pressing) problems with age. This is disgusting. Is it worth changing a hip on a grandma only to have it last a year before she dies? Is it worth doing dental surgery if you only have a few years left?
My grandpa has been ignoring his tooth problems, ignoring his leg problem, digestion problem etc etc because he doesn't want to put a burden on anyone. So he goes round limping everywhere. And then these 70 year old people go on to live another 30-40 years - longer than I've been around!
Meanwhile, I fixed my digestion problems, I see a private dentist. I am planning for the long haul. I look after myself. The thing is, I will continue to do so long while I get into old age. Only when I'm older will I know if my maintenance schedule will ave paid dividends or not.
It's time people stopped looking at their bodies as something holy to a simple engineering subject of high stakes.
A blog I run for the wealth
If you think about that statement for more than a couple of seconds, you will realise how hopelessly flawed it is. Not only are there enormous resource costs and immense practical problems in travelling to other stars, which we wont overcome in any foreseeable future, making the whole notion of space colonisation irrelevant to our discussion. But even if we did manage to invent interstellar space travel tomorrow, we would still have to abide by the laws of physics. It doesn't matter if we were to divert all of our combined resources into spacecraft propulsion, we still can't travel faster than light, meaning that our expansion rate is cubic at best. In other words, even that hypothetical fantasy expansion rate would be overtaken by the growth curve in a matter of decades.
And in case you were now trying to escape on a technicality by talking about for example linear absolute growth, instead of what people normally mean when they talk about growth of the economy, let me point out that that is effectively equivalent to steady-state, since the yearly growth would then tend to 0 %.
The argument that everything has always worked out it the past, so they always will in the future, is flawed on multiple accounts.
1. Things haven't always worked out in the past. There are examples where parts of humanity have overextended their resources to their own detriment or destruction (the collapse of the Atlantic northwest cod fishery to name one), and many more examples if we include external forces.
2. It ignores the fact that the reason we "figured out a ways to avoid" destruction in the past might have been precisely because we predicted that the then current trajectory would lead to "doom". The reason the Y2K problem went by with only minor hiccups was that we did recognise it and actually fixed it before it struck.
3. The argument is a non sequitur: There is nothing to say that, just because we have avoided some obstacle in the past, there must necessarily be a way around a different obstacle in the future. Each risk must be treated in its own right. In many years of driving, I have never crashed a car -- does it mean it is impossible for me to crash?
You're arguing that our expansion rate is faster than that of the universe? That isn't even possible.
First, we still have much more resources than necessary on Earth to sustain a population of five times as much as we have today. According to projections, we won't reach this before 150 years at the earliest. We could attain the capability to build space stations or to build colonies on other planets of the solar system way before that, especially if that becomes a pressing issue.
Seriously. Calling age a disease is a rhetorical manipulation, divorced from the truth. Clinging to this notion is a form of delusion.
Equivalent fancies would call gravity a form of oppression, or render the second law of thermodynamics a form of theft.
These people need psychologists, not funding. Medical care is already unaffordable in the US, with outcomes similar to Kazakhstan. Quack-science like this is a part of the problem.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I'm afraid you lost me completely now.
People in societies without welfare programs have been worrying about old age and retirement for thousands of years, that's why they used to have so many kids.
Don't forget that a good chunk of them died before adulthood. My great-great grandma had 14 kids, and only two of them survived.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
"Live is a disease, with a 100% mortality rate."
What? And subject myself to the uncritical indoctrination that seems to guide your prejudice?
You seem not to be able to see past technological fetishism - the sort that admires scientism - as exemplified by this proposed medicalization of aging.
These are propositions that use scientific learning in the technological pursuit of of human fears and personal demands. This is the same basis for justifying and admiring eugenics or brainwashing.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
People really don't like facing the fact that they will get old. That they will die. That everything about themselves - good and bad - is also inextricably tied to this reality.
Denial. It isn't just for "climate change". ;-)
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Yes, you are clearly lost.
You claim my logic is flawed (even though I didn't even do any sort of logical implication) even though it is yours that clearly is, then you don't understand simple facts.
While I pointed out something that proves that your logic is flawed (since the result is absurd), then let me tell you where you failed. The universe expansion rate is not cubic. E = mc is not the equation that gives how the universe size, mass or energy evolves as time passes.
There is a rodent, whose name I forget, that piles up seeds for food and urinates on it. The urine makes sort of a hard amber-like coating, and preserves them remarkably well. Studying the thousands of such seed piles found in various layers in Egypt, the seed content and distribution points to far more trees at the time of the pharaohs, and a remarkable decline in trees as the civilization expanded. There are many trees that were prevalent before we created cities, that are now completely gone.
You can't simply build pyramids, with thousands of slaves eating sand for lunch, in the middle of the desert without natural resources. It required food, wood, etc and in vast quantities.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
What does the expansion of the universe or the mass-energy equivalence have to do with anything? I never even mentioned that.
You said that "[t]he universe is infinite" so "[t]here is no problem with sustained growth", a logical implication which is provably false. I explained to you why; our resources are even in the most theoretical scenario confined to an expanding sphere of reach, the volume of which increases cubically with regard to time. This translates to a yearly relative growth proportional to 1/t, which tends to zero as t increases. Either you didn't understand what I wrote, or you did and are just trolling me with unrelated nonsense. I don't know which; if you didn't understand then please say so and I'll gladly explain, but in either case, unless you actually respond to what I am saying I don't really see the point of continuing this discussion.
The expansion rate of the universe, by the way, is exponential. Not that that helps the sustainability of our growth in any way, since the total amount of resources still remains constant -- only more vacuum is added, stretching it all apart.
I'm not saying you're wrong; there is some valuable perspective to your observation.
However, you're necessarily taking a short-term view.
Consider this:
The largest problem facing Planet Earth is foolish shortsighted decisions by power holders (e.g. governments, corporations).
By the time many decision makers achieve power, their lives are half over (e.g. ages 50+, which is what most group photos of congress, legislative bodies and various boards-of-directors look like). So why do they care if the environment gets messed up, or energy costs increase a few %ge points. They won't be around in 100 years, so it is easy to think "NOT MY PROBLEM. ALSO, WONT GET ME REELECTED."
But what if they were around in 100 years, or 200 years? And what if their constituents had a Lonnggg memory?
*shrug* Gift or not, all I'm saying is longer-term enlightened self interest could be a force for helping our species make better decisions. In oh so many ways it seems like humans are short sighted fools.
What would life be like if people lived for 200 years on average, maybe some to 300 years.
Would many humans be in such a hurry to make Allah or Jehova or whatever $DEITY happy so they can hang out with the other cool kids afterlife? Or would they have an enlightened self-interest to take more of an interest in what happens here?
Perhaps if people lived longer they might say:
"Hmm... if global warming is a problem in 100 years maybe we should plan for it?"
"Hmmm... maybe we don't want to flush our water supply / aquifers away for some temporary fracking oil profit?"
"Hmm... maybe increasing education funding to help new people make the world a better place is a good idea?"
Hmm... maybe there is long-term benefit to developing human capital? (Instead of freaking out about next quarter's profits - oh noes teh stoks dropping!)
"Hmm... maybe that 20 year mission to pluto, or a 100 year mission to alpha centauri aren't so crazy after all?"
"Hmm... 100 years to colonize mars? What the hell, let's try it."
"Hmm... maybe I do have time to learn Chinese (or insert $LANGAUGE here) and go visit that land, just because it would be fun."
(Economically, opportunity costs decrease as available time (a resource) increases. I will leave it as an exercise to the reader to consider other short-term/long-term decisions that might be better made from a long-term perspective).
If my lifespan was 300 years instead of maybe 80ish, I like to think I'd be taking a longer term view about what I do today and what I plan for in the future.
At any rate, I don't want to distract you from savoring the gift of your mortality.
I'm just pondering other options...
Death is ingrained in the evolution of the genes of all species to help promote change in an environment of limited resources. Death helps to assures that the next generation of genetic experimentation is NOT born into an environment of depleted resources. Yes, most of us would like to slow or completely eliminate aging. However, before we do, we better solve other problems related to resources (food, housing, etc.); otherwise, we'd eventually get to the point of massive genocides and cannibalism.
I live in such a society, and your considerations are true. But retirement is equally valid and it is definitely considered. Hell, there are LAWS against not caring for your parents in old age.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
Many of our problems also come from the old generation KNOWING they are going to fade away. Why bother planing for the future, if they aren't going to be there to see it. Why bother learning new things when you'll be dead before you have a real chance to use them. Why be nice to people, when you'll be long dead before they're in a position to fight back.
If people were 'immortal', then they'd behave quite a bit differently.
Ah yes, the popular "I'm here now, fuck the future" opinion.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
You talked about the speed of light limiting our resources, I therefore implied you used a famous formula with a reference to the speed of light. I see what you mean now, and your modelling of the issue is wrong. As the population increases, it will spread away from Earth too.
repoduction decreases as life span increases. its self balancing
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
and it would quickly turn out that only the rich would be able to afford it while the poor die at the same rate, how does this improve society?
Good leaders run toward problems, bad leaders hide from them.
Your point is nonsense: aging is the primary source for all deseases, hence aging is the actual burden for national healthcare. Say you don't believe science will address aging, but don't deny the above truth.
Well... Shorter lifespans does equate to faster evolution. So if one starts with the (admittedly questionable) premise that we are evolving into something better adapted to future environments then increasing our lifespan may result in humans which are less adapted to their contemporary environments.
Just sayin'. Live longer, adapt slower.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Yes it will, but there is a maximum speed at which it can spread. Theoretically, our speed away from Earth is limited by the speed of light, in practical terms probably to a small fraction of that. But whatever speed we assume, it will result in an expanding sphere of influence growing through space. It is that sphere I am talking about when I say that our resources can only increase cubically.
The problem is that even if all of these numbers start out huge, they only offset the inevitable limit by a small amount. You see, that is the nature of exponential processes -- they are inherently unsustainable. You normally use them to model abrupt events, like nuclear detonations or transistors switching on or off.
Suppose, for the sake of the argument, that our yearly growth is 5% and that we are currently using half of Earth's resources. At that rate, it will take just 14 years until we need all resources. Now suppose we find and manage to travel to 100 new planets. How much extra time does that buy us? About 94 years. What about all the 10 000 000 000 terrestrial planets NASA estimates are in our galaxy? Another 378 years. And here is where you start to see the problem: the Milky Way is 100 000 light years in diameter, which means that even an insanely fast spacecraft would need some million years to cross it.
Our blood will pave the way to the future!
And refusing to call age a disease is a rhetorical manipulation.
The relevant question is whether you want people to live, or people to die.
If that's the case, it's a disease shared by every single solitary thing that exists. Not just living things, but *EVERYTHING*. Stars get old and die too. you know. And even protons have a half-life, and eventually will each decay into a pion and positron.
Here's another name for it: entropy. Somehow I don't think that any ingenuity is going to overcome that.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
"aging is the primary source for all deseases"
An argument, thought out and reasoned, just as clearly as it is spelled.
Get this through your head:
You are going to die.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
It's not what I want.
It's what will happen. It's what's supposed to happen.
It's not life, without death. No death? No Beethoven or Taj Mahal or Pericles or Haiku.
Nada.
Without an end, there is no way to face your existence with grace and courage. Bu don't worry. That's empty speculation. You will get old - if you're lucky.
And? You will certainly die.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
How wonderful it must be for you, to love death more than I love life.
Your lack of vision is appalling. We're very close to being able to artificially create any desired possible human characteristic through direct genetic manipulation, and that includes pollution tolerance, radiation tolerance, arbitrary disease immunity, and much greater intelligence. Why wait 5 or 500 generations when the necessary changes can be made in a year?
I believe either you're reading too much Science Fiction or you're using a very generous definition of "very close". Some of the traits you're talking about, and applying them to a complex organism with a success rate that would be high enough to be acceptable to society, that's orders of magnitude more difficult that what we've accomplished so far in genetic manipulation. Especially intelligence and the immune system are very poorly understood (note that immunity in plants is completely and fundamentally different from immunity in animals).
Perhaps you've never had the experience of accompanying a person in the last year of Parkinson's or some similar hideous age-related disease; there's no other excuse for the hideous cruelty of calling someone shallow for wanting that to end.
Quite the opposite. I've seen family members' health degrade to the point that I felt relieved when they finally died because I couldn't bear seeing them suffer any longer. And I'm probably in for the same - likely at a younger age than the average person. I've thought about this a lot, and learned to accept it as part of life. Whenever there's life, there's suffering. Good, lovable people will die before their time, or die in ways that are painful to even look at. The only way to end that is by ending life itself. You're probably right that I was too harsh to call GGP "shallow" - at an emotional level, who wouldn't want such suffering to end? I think the word "naive" is better - there's no way to end suffering, aging and death, and I believe one can live a happier life by not deceiving oneself about this.
Coming to death need not involve intense suffering, and one way to achieve that is to defeat aging.
I work in the biomedical sciences, and anyone who claims aging can be cured completely is either a quack looking for gullible investors or an idiot. At best, we will find new ways to slow down the process, but the end will be just as nasty - possibly drawn out even longer. There is no aspect of the human body that has evolved to keep on functioning significantly longer than its "warranty". Yes, we can mess with the telomers or telomerases to allow the cells to continue dividing beyond their programmed number of iterations. But that would increase the risk of cancer, which is already a big age-related killer and the least-likely disease to become fully curable (as long as you don't consider old age and death a disease). So we can try to counteract this by increasing the reliability of DNA replication and bolstering DNA repair mechanisms. But that would make cell division slower and less efficient. Our skin would become less damage-resistant and we would develop stomach lining problems. So we need to get a thicker skin and make gastric juice weaker. But then our digestion will be slower, so we either have to increase the size of our stomach or lower our metabolic rate. The latter would also be benificial in decreasing oxidative damage, but would also make us slower, negating the advantage of living longer. And that 's just one of the many problems. Again, the human body is a more complex piece of machinery than anything humanity has ever made, and every part of it degrades with age. The pumps, the ducts, the valves, the wiring, everything. We'd need to find a way to prevent gunk from accumulating in our blood circulation. We could eat more fish, but at the genetic level, known remedies will negatively affect coagulation, exacerbating any hemorrhage. Same thing with the brains - old brain cells die and not every bit of them gets cleaned up. As rubbish accumulates, less
Moderators, the parent has the single most insightful and well-written comment in this whole discussion. It summarises the entire case for longevity.
They take 20-30 years, not because of less medicalizing - but because of more.
I'm not arguing against health, or good medicine. But we have industry segments that make trillions out of stretching your final agonies, leaving your families impoverished by your passing, while stealing from the kinds of real medical benefit that result in higher standards of living.
US has lower quality medical outcomes than Bulgaria, for many common measures.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I see this kind of "reasoning" all the time, it's really a hallmark of propaganda.
Drug companies want to make expensive products that they can make enormous profits from. They don't CARE about quality of life issues or longevity AT ALL, and neither does most of the "medical" establishment, which is essentially owned by the drug companies. Throw in the parasitic US insurance industry, and all delusions of anything that resembles efficiency goes out the window.
Look, how many people on the planet is too much/enough ? It's insane to keep up the crazy pace of explosive population growth and at the same time not expect some sort of global catastrophe.
There ARE drugs, nutritional options, and lifestyle choices that indisputably slow/reverse ageing - to an extent. The drugs, for the most part, you are NOT going to have access to within the US medical care system, since by far most of them are not huge profit-makers, and to be frank, most American physicians are so incompetent that they don't even KNOW about them. There are a dozen safe, inexpensive drugs which slow/reverse ageing I can name off the top of my head that you can't get through the US medical system. With some rudimentary digging I could probably list over 50. Your doctor is NEVER going to talk about them with you, much less prescribe them, and I have zero interest in talking about them because it's essentially a crime to do so.
We put doctors on a bullshit pedestal in this country. They are NOT, for the most part, brilliant or "humanitarian" in ANY way; they've gone to an overpriced trade school, for Christ's sakes. They get the bulk of their information from industry. They make most of their money not from offering competent services, but from peddling crap you do not need.
The FDA is NOT your friend, has not done their job for DECADES, and is hopelessly corrupt.
Industry and the media do NOT encourage you to make lifestyle choices that are healthy, because it cuts into their advertisers bottom line.
The dream of a world with a massive population of healthy, productive elderly people is pure fantasy, and a deadly fantasy at that.
Or it will be come extremely conservative. The few people at first, presumably rich to begin with, who will be able to live longer via presumably expensive treatments will amass even more wealth than they already have.
There is nothing simple about this idea.
The most insightful comment on this thread so far.
This argument shows beyond any doubt that our historical rate of growth must be very close to zero, and that our beloved economists and politicians who keep dreaming about a sustained 3-5% growth rate are deluded, and deluding us.
How can you be so arrogant to think it should be modifiable?
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
This would work for the smarter, more savvy longer lifers but what of the simpleton? Assuming they aren't excluded from this treatment then I would make my guess that they would spend this money on other things. Yes, you can only have so much 'stuff' but what's to stop the average worker bee from needing that hot new electronic every couple years, nice new car, etc etc.
Plus you may have paid off that mortgage at year 50, but now the foundation's cracked, the roof is leaking and you have termites. (As my father used to say - You have two choices, every month you can pay the car dealer or the mechanic.) I know there are numerous, numerous classic homes that are still in great shape, but average Joe doesn't tend to keep good maintenance tabs on his cars and home so I doubt his will be that way. And why should he? It's not leaking on his new 75" TV, so it's fine.
Not to mention that was sort of the woman's 'job' back then. She was expected to 'be fruitful and multiply'. There's more choice now and much less incentive to be a walking uterus in modern society, although it's still slanted towards the ideology that women are damaged in some way if they haven't settled down and popped out a few by their 40s.
If this were to become realistic where infinite or much extended life was provided I doubt it would be provided to everyone. Supply and demand dictates it would be very popular especially at the beginning and thus costly for one reason alone (if not cost of treatment and maintenance) and that is greed. I doubt this would be something you get 'taken care of' at your annual visit with your doctor for a $20 insurance copay.
That being said, it would be ideal to have an infinite life - sterilization trade off. Let's say at the age of 30 you want to opt into the procedure or treatment, then you must have not exceeded your maximum number of offspring (preferably set at zero) already and you must first undergo sterilization. This would help prevent any over population issues from occurring.
Some people feel an innate urge to reproduce, some just happen in that situation without proper planning (showing poor planning skills) and thus would be exempt from this everlasting or extended life. For a lot of people having a family is very important and a biological urge. They have to reproduce, it's ingrained into them. These people would obviously not opt for the life extension and would be coexisting with the extended living. Thus leaving the Earth in the case of mass extinction with two seperate parties, the breeders and the non-breeders. (Which would probably open an entirely different can of worms on it's own besides the concept of denying people treatment and dooming them to 'death' since they decided to have children. We all know people can't be expected to take responsibility for their decisions. They want their cake and to eat it too, as well as your cake.)
Exponential population growth is still happening regardless of lifespans, and genetic evolution will continue as soon as someone figures out how to use something like a retrovirus to make changes to an adult's DNA. I suspect that one of the main psychological reasons for resistance to life extension technology is the fear that you will be expected to stay alive after you are bored with life. Dustin p.s. and there is always the attachment to traditional personality traits/programs which are generally optimized to give short-term competitive advantage at the expense of safety and long term physical and mental health.
You say "OR" as if it isn't the rich and privileged getting us into these wars.